The Public Eye

Out at the inauguration of the estimable Debbie Freund as president of Claremont Graduate University Thursday, much of the festivities surrounding which took place on the Pomona College campus, I searched out the restroom after lunch. In the hallway, I looked right: Women. I looked left: Men. That was the ticket. As I approached the […]

This young man tuned up his cello onstage as The Pasadena Conservatory of Music celebrated on Saturday its first decade at 100 N. Hill Ave., where it hosts its 1,250 students. But with a need to expand, the PCM also celebrated acquisition of a new building just north of the old one on Hill, and […]

Villa Aurora, high above the ocean in Pacific Palisades, was the home of German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and his artist wife Marta, who fled the Nazis for coastal Los Angeles in the late 1930s. The house was home to many salons featuring the likes and thoughts of other emigres such as Thomas Mann and Bertolt […]

Couple of Saturday nights ago the Mariachi Divas — some from El Monte — packed the Levitt Pavillion in Memorial Park with the most crowded and most autentico show I’ve seen all summer. Ay yi yi, que Jalisciense! Read the Full Story at Larry Wilson’s Public Eye

Rupa and the April Fishes were even hotter, Friday night at the Levitt Pavillion in Memorial Park, than Michelle Mills’ preview in our Scene magazine would have led you to believe. And that’s pretty hot. This is the kind of show that gives the odd moniker World Music — we all of us live in […]

These young cats were rocking their mini-Strats Thursday morning onstage in the auditorium of Wilson Middle School, where a totally enviable summer school program sponsored by the nonprofit Pasadena Educational Foundation is in its fifth week. Enviable in the sense that, recalling my own junior high summer school terms — math, and weight training in […]

Mr. Poetic, aka Darnell Davenport, was one of the team members from the Leimert Park-based slam poetry team Brass Knuckles, heading to the national championships soon in Boston (and raising funds to do so: http://www.indiegogo.com/Brass-Knuckles-LA-Slam-Team) who were part of the show Tuesday night at the first anniversary bash for Indelible Ink. The music and spoken […]

In my upcoming column in the next Rose magazine, I take my search for decent live local rock music to Cafe 322 in Sierra Madre, where last week the brilliant art rockers Human Hands — including my lifelong friend Pierre Smith, above, on guitar — were kicking out the jams. Plus, there’s lasagna! Read the […]

I was in the Texas Panhandle for four days last week, for the annual reunion of my mother’s side of the family. I’ve been back to Amarillo and the Palo Duro Canyon, where this picture was shot, every summer of my life, and I’ve never seen it so dry. In a part of the world […]

The Japanese Garden at the Huntington Library is still closed for restoration — of the lush plantings in that cool little glade, of the wooden bridge, of the big old Japanese house that’s now back from Japan where it was repaired and of the new Japanese house recently donated by a Buddhist temple in Northwest […]